Rebirth

In a relationship with a parent
that doesn’t quite work we are constantly like
a mechanism that reaches a point
where another gear should engage …
It's like a design fault we carry around
and reproduce in later life.

The infant impulse is to blame,
to demand our unmet need;
but a mature perspective shows us
that such incongruity
makes a first-class tool for seeing
into the nature of life itself.

I kept Mama at bay because
her wish for a shared love deluged me,
drowning my young awareness in what
could have nurtured my growing life;
so that I became a body
sinking where I should have swum.

Here we see how karma works
over successive generations.
My mother looked for that great love,
that one enduring incandescence
which every woman craves and no man
ever truly understands –

she wanted especially to live throu me.
She did not see how the same boat
could not have rescued both of us.
I lit out and swam to shore.
but I'm not sure she ever did,
marooned at the mercy of the sea.

I've heard of a therapy in my dreams
where parents and children swim together
on the current of their eyes,
borne upstream on natural love
that comes when two are willing to
voyage on this waterless river.

With human eyes we could not do this,
but now I sense a dam of blessings
tower above me. Keeping focus
on her eyes I take a block
and all cascade around me like
heaven-scented butterflies.

The gift: to live within this state.
The challenge: to accept an angel
whose energies I so long rejected.

I find with delightful terror I’m still
alive! The wave broke over me
leaving a covering of stardust and rose petals.

Prayer

Lord by your mercy
let me be her work.
Bring me to completion
as she would have wished …

throu her grace, a feather
on the breath of god,
yet held by gravity,
let me be spirit on earth.

May I know what you want
by what she inspires.
May my life express
the suddenness of joy.

Time for a new timetable,
created not by logic
but by feeling – a clock
whose hands are moved by love.

The morning after my mother’s funeral

Be

Be

Breathe

Allow

Love


Inspire

Learn

Build

Fulfill


Complete

Smile

Share

Merge

The morning after my mother’s funeral

Sonnet on the morning of her funeral

I have not lost a mother, but gained a guide.
Released from flesh, and all that that implies,
I feel her presence now – a joyful bride
entering the royal mansion of the skies.

What she most desired was to belong.
A simple soul, she wanted love too much
and had to live with loss, but it made her strong:
she felt no shame in making faith her crutch.

Where inspiration comes from noone knows:
it arises from a geology of the heart.
For me, in flesh a soil which blocked my flow
my mother, now in spirit, seems to impart
an upward passage throu which water goes …
and see, above, how all the fountains start!

Ave Maris Stella

And so it's down to this:
from my mother I'd wanted
a sense of place in the world –
but this she couldn't give me,
never finding her own.

Now she's dead, I see
how what she gave me was
a 'bridged uncertainty',
an inchoate knowledge of
that complex emptiness

where arrival is departure,
(quantum meta-physics!)
the world of paradox
where, learning to be empty,
we discover fullness.

I cannot say how far
my mother finally got
along the swaying rope bridge
linking earth and sky
above the foaming rapids.

In one sense she was always
there – for even as her
frail and weary flesh
wavered each step across
the terrifying void

her soul shone, beckoning.
My mother's gift and challenge:
the journey I must complete,
that inner mystical union,
the arrival at my birth.

And so she's with me now.
Never an earthly guide,
yet now the stella polaris
which she sought herself
and so at last becomes.